The Birthday Gator

Runway cake

Every year on each of my kids' birthdays, I've made their birthday cake.  I think it started because my oldest son liked airplanes since he was old enough to toddle through the house, screaming "AhBEE!  AhBEE!" when the F-4 jets from our local air guard base flew over our house.  (It took us awhile to figure out that he was actually saying "airplane")  We couldn't find a bakery who could decorate a cake with F-4 planes with cammo colors.  Taking into consideration my incredibly poor artistic abilities, I managed a cake with a chocolate runway with die cast metal planes stuck on cardboard and frosted over.  I found a picture of it in the depths of my hoard of his baby pictures. 

When this same son's birthday came around last fall, I wanted to continue practicing my decorating skills.  My dear husband , who constantly spoils me ROTTEN, surprised me with a couple of cupcake decorating books containing tons of cute cupcake ideas.  Some look almost overwhelming, but one day I'd really like to try doing some of the craziest ones.  Mostly, though, I've used them to give me some ideas.  Many of the designs are made with cupcakes grouped together and frosted as if they were one cake.  Because my kids all live over an hour away, there's no way I could transport an arrangement of cupcakes held together with frosting. 

Since my oldest enjoys asking friends and family to bring him back an alligator or a shark when vacationing, I knew which of the designs in the books I was going to do - the one where the cupcakes are arranged in the shape of an alligator.  I modified it slightly because I was short by a couple of cupcakes and because I had to be able to move them. 

Gator Eyes

Gator Claws

The book recommends using zip lock bags and cutting the corner out, but I really don't like using the zip bags -- over the years, I've never had much luck using them with tips with and without couplers, I used a #150 carnation tip, mixed up a swampy green color (mixed blue, red, and yellow paste color until it was sufficiently yukky looking) to create the overall "skin" and broke apart Hershey bars for the bumps.  While the book used marshmallows for the eyes, I couldn't justify opening an entire bag of marshmallows to use just one, so using a #12 round tip, I simply piped two round eyes and used a little blob of black frosting from that tube of black frosting.  Also, the book uses little hard candy bananas for the claws - I didn't have any, so again used a tube of yellow that I had with a leaf tip  and kind of starting out like a regular leaf then releasing the pressure on the tube and pulling away.  Not as pretty or perfect, as you can see, but it did the job. (I'm realizing now that keeping an assortment of those things that look like toothpaste tubes full of colored frosting, is probably practical for the times when all I need is a little bit of one color.)

Finished Gator

My Strange Carrot Cake

Remembering that my future daughter-in-law wants some of the wedding cupcakes to be carrot cake, I looked at a bunch of recipes.  Then I remembered I may have to make 50+ on top of the 50+ of the other flavors and thought I'd try out the Duncan Hines Carrot Cake mix.  Foolishly, I still don't know if it tastes "right" but the reports have been encouraging.  You see, I made my hubby take the uncut cake to work where I wouldn't tangle with it and it would get eaten before it could dry out.  Cupcakes have a little longer life expectancy around here.  2 pieces of cake would be BAD for me, whereas 2 cupcakes … well, they’re little, therefore I can get away with eating 2 in an EMERGENCY.  (That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!)

The point of this project was to try out the cake mix.  The kids were kind of interested in having a small cake that they could freeze, per tradition.  So, what better way to try out my newly acquired cake decorating skills? 

Under normal circumstances, carrot cake comes with a cream cheese frosting but I wanted to work on decorating so I made the regular white buttercream frosting and used that.  In my class we learned to skim coat a cake, letting it set up and then frosting over that.  It makes the cake look so much nicer!  We also learned that the skim coat helps keep the cake moist if it has to be made a day before.

Teacher's Frosting "Shells"

My "shells" around the bottom

In the class, I flunked making "shells" with the #33 tip.  Here is how my teacher made them - I kept them for reference until they fell apart.  For whatever reason, getting the proper 'poof' at the top just wasn't happening.  Practice makes perfect and I still need a LOT of practice, but the shell decoration at the bottom of the cake came out pretty well.  On the other hand, the loop decoration around the top edge left quite a bit to be desired.

Roses, rosebuds, & leaves

Next came the roses.  They're really not that hard BUT, in my opinion, if your frosting isn't the right consistency it's a lot harder.  In this case, my frosting was too soft - should have added more powdered sugar but didn't think of it in time.  I used tip #104 and made the roses on waxed paper squares stuck with a dab of frosting on a flower nail and scooched them off onto the cake before they were dry enough - haste makes waste - but they weren't too bad and  the addition of leaves helped hide some boo boos and filled in a little.

Finally … the writing.  Since I knew this cake was going to work with my hubby, I didn't want people to think I didn't know any better than to use buttercream frosting on a carrot cake instead of cream cheese.  Having written "Happy Birthday …" a gazillion times in my life, I didn't think I'd have any trouble doing it on this cake.  WRONG.  In the past, I used the cake frosting in a can - much softer - and my hands were getting tired so my writing had seen better days.

Ta DA!  Finished cake!

The report back was that everyone loved the cake and several commented that they liked it better with the buttercream frosting.  Now that we're getting down to the wire, I think I'm going to have to run it by the kids and see which they'd like. 

And, I probably SHOULD try one, too!  (Oh darn!)